I read with a wry smile Troy Hunt’s post about procurement and payment handling.

My voluntary work means I’ve seen this from both sides, and regular readers will know I don’t like either of them very much.

I’m relatively lucky in my day job - I work for an SME which recognizes that people who can be trusted to hire, fire and direct a team of staff whose annual salary bill is well into seven figures should probably be trusted with a few hundred a month of discretionary spending. And as such, I have a company credit card with a decent limit. Of course, any poor … sap … who has had to use the same expenses reporting system as me will … concur … that the “paperwork” associated at the end of the month is still rather painful. I guess if we were big enough for me to have a PA, we’d also have those tedious policies and procurement goons I can live without!

Meanwhile in the “third sector”, charging people by invoice and having them pay by bank transfer remains a hot mess. For sure, Open Banking (GoCardless née Nordigen) has eased the pain somewhat, but getting people to put a meaningful reference on their payments is hit and miss. You can put the request in bright red text on an invoice which they have to scroll past to get to the amount, and they still don’t read / act upon it.

It also remains an insult how organisations of all sizes are slow at paying when it’s a charity or volunatary group on the other end. Maybe they are just as crap to their commercial suppliers, but I suspect there’s extra disregard because they think we won’t ding their credit rating, take legal action or charge interest.

And don’t even get me started on the handful of holdouts still paying by cheque in 2024. I really wish banks had had the backbone to force the death of cheque clearing a few years back as originally planned - there is simply no excuse for this nonsense in 2024. Especially as the postal service makes the reliability of sending and receiving them very poor.

PS Troy, as I replied in your comments section - the answer to “how do organisations with no credit cards do travel” is probably that they expect staff to pay and then claim back. I certainly experienced this earlier in my career, and the assumption that staff had their own credit cards and were happy to donate a chunk of their monthly limit to their employer was delightful. Especially given the glacial payback times.

Double PS The opposite of a shout-out to CAF Bank, whose debit cards are so useful that I almost never use mine, preferring to use a personal card and get paid back by the charity later. For why? Well, I only really use my debit card on this account for large procurements, e.g. a laptop or mobile phone every 18 months. And about half the time the purchase gets blocked because “too big” and I get a phone call about it during office hours days later. Not worth the faff.